Born
in the year of the goat in Baracoa/Cuba, Elke Marhöfer is an artist
living in Berlin. Via the potentialities of moving image and suppositious
writing
she
works with notions of self-admitted foreignness and radical othering.
She collaborates with dear friends and things, revising notions of
animals, vegetables and objects. Within distant environments she investigates
specific events and practices that traverse binary oppositions. Linking
for example, the nonhuman with the postcolonial,
she discusses how nature cuts across history, being simultaneously
historical situated, evoking human and nonhuman testimonies
of past and current events, recognizing their specificities, and at
the same time surpassing and escaping historical formatting with its
unique and machinic mode of constantly evolving, changing and creating
something new. Elke tests nonhuman perspectives, translating a technology
like the camera, from a human cultural and technical device into an
extension of the intensive forces within the surrounding environment,
so that the camera becomes a tool, which is in principle
not different from nonhuman animal tools, similar to orangutans using
leaves to make squeaky kiss noises.

Elke studied Fine Art at the University of the Arts in Berlin,
at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and at the Whitney Independent
Study Program in New York City. Since 2010 she pursues a PhD at the University
of Gothenburg. Elke has received fellowships, grants, and generous support
from IASPIS Residency Sweden, Akademie Schloss Solitude Stuttgart, Cité Internationale
des Arts, Paris. Her art exhibitions include the Palais de Tokyo Paris,
Manufactura’s Studio Wuhan, FCAC Shanghai, the Houston Museum of
Fine Arts, NGBK Berlin, Kunstverein Hannover, Museum für Gegenwartskunst
Siegen and The Showroom, London. She lectures in conferences such as DARE,
Deleuze and Artistic Research Conference Ghent, Deleuze’s
Cultural Encounters with the New Humanities, Hong Kong and Daughters
of Chaos, Deleuze Studies International Conference Stockholm. Her
films have been screened at the BFI - Film Festival London, Berlinale Internationale
Filmfestspiele Berlin, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Courtisane
Festival Ghent
and Images Film Festival Toronto.